In which Jimbo takes centre stage in a 'leet penguin suit, and Rowan refuses to STFU and crawl under a rock ...

Shattered.

Without a by-your-leave, or a word of explanation, early this morning there was no sight or sound from Our Henry.

The pond had to check that it was Friday, and then looked Our Henry up, and yes, it was a bigly week since he'd helped out the Australian Daily Zionist News with Overpaid vice-chancellors parade their ignorance.

What did the reptiles produce as an alternative to this wreckage, this dereliction of duty, this studied insult?

Jimbo!

Just Jimbo ... and not that Jimbo, this Jimbo ...

And worse it was double barrelled Jimbo, as the reptiles reverted to a favourite ploy of having Jimbo offer a column over on the far right of the digital rag, and then have a reptile hack regurgitate its contents as an EXCLUSIVE as the news lead of the day ...

The reptile hack of the day was Geoff, assigned the task of pretending he'd done something to earn the EXCLUSIVE ...

The pond dipped into it for the sheer pleasure, the impossible absurdity, of seeing one more time Jimbo posed at the top of the piece, as if a manifestation of the cultural 'leets the reptiles purport to despise ...

For the rest of that astonishing EXCLUSIVE, go here ...

EXCLUSIVE
Trashing free society: Paterson’s repudiation of Hanson
James Paterson calls for reforms to unis and the judiciary to stop threat of Hanson and populist right
The senior Liberal conservative says the ‘age of disruption and rise of populism’ threatens the Australian way of life.
By Geoff Chambers

But why drink at Geoff's EXCLUSIVE hack trough when you can go to the original horse's mouth? 

The header: Lies, conspiracies, anger: Don’t let populism trash our fragile inheritance; We should be very wary of those on the right who want to import foreign concepts of cultural uniformity to Australia.

The caption, featuring a new angle on Jimbo in a penguin suit, a manifestation of the cultural 'leets the reptiles purport to detest and despise: James Paterson delivering his speech to the Ramsay Centre at the State Library of NSW. Picture: Chris Pavlich / The Australian

The Ramsay centre's now based at the State Library?

Nah, it's just a mangling, just like the way that Jimbo had to spend a bigly eight minutes mangling blather about Western Civilisation (remember the caps!), as he goose stepped around the way that Gina's pet actually embodied pretty much every position favoured by the lizard Oz, and the Liberal and National parties, this past decade or so.

This called for an exceptional form of pomposity, while pandering to the nonsense the Ramsay centre embodies ...

The unique inheritance of Western civilisation is not just the great books, art, music and science, although they certainly have shaped our culture in a profound way. It is the institutions of Western civilisation that are truly unique and consequential. Institutions such as our Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, our common law system of courts and an independent judiciary, and our universities.
For Australia, these institutions were primarily, though not exclusively, inherited, developed, and refined from the British, and translated to our continent at settlement. 

Say what? No mention of the classic onion muncher ploy of attributing it to a Judaeo-Xian tradition emanating from the middle east, as peddled by a swarthy type of dubious Semitic appearance?

Never mind ...

We should never assume just because we inherited these remarkable institutions from previous generations that transferring them to future generations is assured.
Because we are living in an age of disruption and populism. And the institutions we may have taken for granted in the past do not have the near universal support and approval they might have once enjoyed.
They are fragile. In many quarters they are under outright attack.
The populist challenge
A poll this week laid bare the bleak outlook for our fellow citizens. A record 68 per cent believe our country is heading in the wrong direction; 44 per cent say they are experiencing personal financial distress; 47 per cent believe they are worse off than their parents were at the same stage of life.
They are right to be angry. Australia’s post-pandemic economic performance has been dismal. Real wages have fallen by 5 per cent since 2021, when the average OECD member has seen a 5 per cent increase. It is understandable why distrust in our institutions rises when people feel like it is not delivering for them materially. But the danger is these anti-establishment parties don’t just mine grievance about poor economic performance. Whether on the populist left or right, they bring with them a much broader wagon of grudges and resentments.
Right now, they also have a helping hand from some foreign state and non-state actors, who see strategic advantage and even profit from weaponising our distrust and amplifying our divisions. It is easier than ever before for them to do so.

One thing's certain. The reptile obsession with the monster they've created - after all, Gina's pampered pet has found most of her policies within the pages of The Australian - will only draw more attention to her, and make her stronger ... One Nation senators Malcolm Roberts and Pauline Hanson in the Senate chamber.

After all, that prize loon Malcolm Roberts is just one of a long line of climate science deniers following the hive mind line ...

Jimbo handily decided not to go there ...and sought safety in other topics ...

Once, they would have had to mount a sophisticated human intelligence operation to influence journalists, editors or producers who controlled access to the public square in democracies. Now they can pump our public square full of propaganda by hijacking Western-headquartered social media platforms using inauthentic accounts or by covertly paying mercenary influencers to promote their agenda.
Even easier is secretly putting their thumb on the scale of the algorithm of foreign authoritarian-controlled applications to serve content that divides and distracts us.
The risk today is that understandable discontent with Australia’s recent economic performance – a solvable policy problem – is used as a vehicle to trash our political, legal and social institutions.
Australians struggling with the cost of living have not suddenly embraced conspiracy theories about chemtrails, the Federal Reserve, school shootings, 9/11 and pharmaceutical companies. But populism is a package deal.
Voting to express your reasonable frustrations with the established parties of government brings with it a lot of baggage. Those of us who want to preserve what is great about our Western society and way of life have two tasks.
First, address our economic underperformance to remove the main driver of populist discontent. Second, defend and, where necessary, reform the institutions of Western civilisation so they can survive this disrupted era.
The most fundamental idea of the “small c” conservative philosophy is that institutions must evolve gradually over time through the accumulation of wisdom. There are three institutions I will focus on: universities, the rule of law and pluralism.
Our universities
There is no institution more critical to the progress and success of Western civilisation that is more vulnerable in a populist era than our universities. The prosperity, progress and advancement of our civilisation in science, art and culture cannot be separated from the teaching, research and thinking conducted in our universities over centuries.
Right now, though, many universities feel underfunded and under-appreciated. They warn policymakers their business models are unsustainable, and the lack of public funding and interventions such as the Job-Ready Graduates Scheme, are leading them to cut staff and courses. I know many universities and their defenders believe these policies are the cause of their current malaise.
But this gets their dilemma exactly backwards. The reason why universities are not better funded and supported by our political system is because they have lost the broad social licence to sustain public support. And the reason for that is that a significant proportion of society feel estranged from our system of higher education.

Actually the universities have never recovered from the school of "what we need is plumbers and sparkies", and if you want an arts education be prepared to sacrifice your first born child brand offered to them by SloMo and his mates.

Remember Jimbo?

It’s time to axe the Morrison-era policy strangling Australia’s humanities degrees (sorry, that's a Crikey paywall)
‘Unless we have lawyers from all class backgrounds, we will have a legal system that is shaped by a particular narrow set of perspectives and assumptions and blind spots.’
Varsha Yajman

I enrolled in an arts and law bachelor’s degree in 2020 and left with a HECS debt of around $40,000. Students who started the same degree in 2021 and after will have left owing around $85,000. The blame for this lies at the feet of the Morrison-era Job-ready Graduates Package (JRGP).
While Australia was battling the COVID-19 pandemic, the Morrison government tried to encourage students to enrol in areas of “national need” that would help “drive economic recovery”, slashing fees for STEM and nursing while more than doubling the cost of humanities degrees, with law and commerce becoming the most expensive. 
But research has shown that the JGRP, rather than furthering the Australian economy, will likely worsen skills shortages. In 2024, the Australian Universities Accord stated the policy “should be replaced” and that it had “tilted the overall cost burden of higher education further onto students and away from the Australian government”. 

And so on, and of course the current Labor government has been equally tardy on this matter, but so much for all that blather about the glories of Western Civilisation.

In traditional Australian Daily Zionist News fashion, the reptiles slipped in a standard demonic snap comporting to Australian Daily Zionist News standards... An anti-Israel protest at Melbourne University. Picture: Jason Edwards

How to get out of the Western Civilisation bind? Pretend it's all about the long march through the institutions by lefties!

And so it was on to Jimbo trying to bs his way through the pricing of the humanities out of the marketplace ...

Classical liberals and conservatives believe their perspectives are unwelcome, at least in the humanities departments at universities across Australia. Australian data is limited, but there is no reason to think our universities differ much from American higher education, and there the data is stark and extensive. I don’t believe cabinet would have agreed to a Job-Ready Graduates Scheme that deprioritised the teaching of humanities, or allowed their fees to rise significantly, if they felt that they had a stake in what is taught there. But most Coalition MPs would tell you they regard what is exclusively taught at universities as openly hostile to their beliefs, and many of their constituents agree.
And if universities think that’s bad, the movement that seeks to replace centre-right politics in this country makes a Coalition government look like a walk in the park for higher education.
These are people who often display open contempt for expertise, and gleefully indulge in the most absurd conspiracy theories in the face of all evidence.
Universities should be alarmed that four years of centre-left government has seen no meaningful increase to their funding, no changes to the Job-Ready Graduates Scheme, cuts to their international student numbers and a massively increased regulatory burden. The recent, troubling antisemitism crisis on campus has not helped.
Universities need to do two things. First, make a meaningful attempt to ensure there is a diversity of views, especially in their humanities faculties. If any other group in society were as under-represented among their faculty as conservatives and classical liberals, every university would establish a working group to fix it.
Second, prioritise research in the national interest, and tell the Australian people – who ultimately fund it – about this critical contribution.

So you're now whining about how there's been no changes to the JRGP policy your government, with you in that government, implemented?

When it came to the 2020 vote, nobody rebelled against their party...

It's always the hypocrisy that gets to the pond.

Speaking of Western Civilisation...

And now at last the hypocrite in full flower, and so to another ginger dance...

The rule of law
The second institution I am gravely concerned about is the rule of law. One of the few things that separates a free and ordered society from domestic anarchy is the belief that a justice system will ensure wrongdoers are punished fairly. And yet decisions of our justice system are more routinely becoming sensationalised.
As you know, there is a high-profile prosecution of a former Australian soldier currently before the courts, following allegations of war crimes. Unlike some of my parliamentary colleagues, I do not want to run the risk of contempt of court. But we have recently seen this case become so politicised that a photo of an accused person was displayed at polling booths as a tactic to generate votes.

The reptiles followed up that peculiar foot dance with a snap of an alleged war criminal, Ben Roberts-Smith.

What with being gormless and gutless, Jimbo showed such bravery that Roberts-Smith's name never passed his lips, at least in the Oz-edited version:

Public support for the rule of law and, critically, an independent judiciary, is undermined when sentencing fails to meet community expectations. There have been too many cases, especially with violent and sexual crimes, where perpetrators are given light sentences. While we do not sentence criminals by opinion poll, and the individual circumstances of each case are relevant, too often the legal system appears out of touch with the people whose justice it is supposed to administer.
Nothing fuels populist discontent in our justice system more than the perception their justified outrage at its failings is being carefully managed to resist necessary reform. In May, Justice Beech-Jones launched a bizarre attack on a small voluntary legal association, the Samuel Griffith Society, and its American equivalent, the Federalist Society. He accused the Society of misappropriating Samuel Griffith’s legacy and being engaged in “ominous” activism on university campuses.
The Justice was particularly concerned about a paper presented to an SGS conference by my former Senate colleague, Amanda Stoker, who advocated taking greater care to consider the judicial philosophy of potential candidates for the bench before appointing them. For this, she is accused of “court stacking” and associated with a North Korean judicial college.

Does Jimbo have the first clue about the Federalist Society and what they wrought?

It's a bit like Faux Noise and the way they've prodded the disunited states into a black hole of madness ...

C.f. the both siderist NY Times ...

The Federalist Society Is Torn Between Its Legal Philosophy and Trump’s Demands
Guided by Leonard Leo, the society built a pipeline for traditional conservative judges. But that might not be enough for President Trump in his second term.

So what if they were hoist on their own petard.

They'd helped stack the Supreme Court, which promptly gave mad King Donald a grand form of immunity, and now here we are ...and Jimbo thinks Mandy has the first clue about all that?

And this guy should take the rap? Justice Robert Beech-Jones at Sydney’s Queen Square Courthouse. Picture: Oscar Colman

And so Jimbo ends up sounding just like Gina's pet ...

To justify his attack, Justice Beech-Jones commented extensively on US domestic public policy issues, including gun control, and said: “Ordinarily all this would be none of my business but these methods are being advocated for in Australia … To adapt a phrase, they have driven into my lane and they have driven into yours. If anyone thinks this particular US style of court stacking and judicial decision-making is a good idea, then go and live there.”
The problem, as the Justice surely knows, is that judicial appointments are not “his lane”. He may wish to live in a country where a cozy club of judges chooses its own colleagues. But in a common law democracy such as ours, judicial appointments are solely a matter for the elected governments of this country. I don’t want to live in a country where the decisions of judges begin to be called into question because of their unwise interventions into political debate.

And so the dance continued, what with Jimbo trying to sound like Pauline, but not really Pauline ...

Pluralism
Another of those intangible, philosophical institutions that has been so critical to the functioning of our harmonious and free society is the principle of pluralism.
There has been a lot of debate in recent weeks about how we practise multiculturalism in Australia. Two things can be true at the same time: That Australia is a multicultural country. Also that it’s reasonable to disagree about whether the policies that underpin multiculturalism are working well, or not. One thing that would be totally alien to our history and political culture would be a government-imposed monoculture. We should be very wary of those on the right who want to import foreign concepts of cultural uniformity to Australia.
This has never been part of the Australian tradition. I do not agree with those who argue that “diversity is our strength”. Diversity in and of itself is not a strength. There are many diverse countries today that are not strong at all. Our strength is that despite our diversity, we have generally been a harmonious and cohesive society. This is thanks to pluralism. We have a live-and-let-live philosophy. Most Australians are comfortable that their neighbour may observe their own cultural traditions and have their own religious beliefs. But pluralism is not relativism.

For no particular reason, the reptiles flung in a visual reminder of that classic loon Mandy, useless in office and even more useless out of it, and now reduced to Oodgeroo toad status, Amanda Stoker.

Jimbo then performed a classic twist and pike:

In an Australian context, that means we can – and should – insist on the respect for and adherence to shared Australian values as part of any successful embrace of multiculturalism. If we don’t, we run the very serious risk of descending into a nation of tribes.
That is why I would never support our migration system discriminating against someone on the basis of their race, religion or nationality, as some have advocated, and I am more than comfortable with it being discerning about their values.
Frankly, the explosion of antisemitism in Australia in recent years is partly because we have failed to do this. We cannot practise multiculturalism in a way that tears us apart. We should never be afraid to insist that people who make a life here be from among the many in the world who share our values and want to sustain them, not those who want to change them.
Senator James Paterson is opposition defence spokesman. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered to the Ramsay Centre on Thursday evening in Sydney.

And if discerning their values isn't about their race and religion and nationality, what on earth is it about? If it's about sharing "our values", then Jimbo's all the way with Pauline banning those damned Islamics and Asians from the country.

And there's the Liberal party's (and the lizard Oz's) current dilemma in a nutshell. Too gutless to take on Gina's pet, too dedicated to their myopic brand of bigotry, fear and loathing, patented over decades, only to see it snatched away and rebranded as a form of generic populism they can't control ...

In that context, dressing up in a penguin suit is the least of Jimbo's thought crimes ...

Is there a reptile who manages to sound even more pathetic?

Of course there is ...

PM’s latest obsession is one he refuses to name
Similar to his approach linking Peter Dutton with Donald Trump, Anthony Albanese has adopted a Voldemort ‘she who must not be named’ approach to Pauline Hanson.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Just a thought? How is not naming Gina's pet the same as naming the mutton Dutton and linking him to the named and clearly barking mad King Donald?

The pond will concede a couple of things.

This Geoff is a prolific chamberer of rounds.

And the reptiles know which side their sales are buttered on. Just as the media was entranced, fell into a swoon at the sight of mad King Donald in his early days, so the reptiles have now fallen hard for Pauline, purveyor of their policies ...

She sells, bigly ... just like that bloody woke movie ...

And speaking of that bigotry, hate and fear mongering, the reptiles were at it again today ...

The pond refuses to indulge the reptiles in their TG jihad ...

Luckily the pond also felt no need to go here ...

Take that, chatbot: why I’m bringing back handwritten exams
AI will neither be as catastrophic as the pessimists fear nor as beautiful as the futurists imagine.
By Mark Edele
Contributor

Who on earth is this loon?

Mark Edele is Hansen Professor in History and head of the history program at the University of Melbourne. He developed the idea for this essay in a notebook, using a pen.

The University of Melbourne?!

The pond should have guessed it.

Did he want to make Jimbo sound sensible on the matter of academia?

The pond's handwriting looks like a spider had wandered too close to an inkwell ... it makes Molesworth look like a master of calligraphy, and it was 'rooned by academics demanding that the pond transcribe their insights, imagining them to be dollops of gold ...

And that's about it for the far right this day, though the pond must mention this rant ...

The hot-take economy is poisoning the public square
Who is entitled to demand public space to promote their personal views on areas beyond their expertise or particular knowledge?
By Rowan Callick

First a credential ...

Rowan Callick is an expert associate at the Australian National University’s National Security College.

Somehow that makes Rowan think he has the right to rant and rage away in the lizard Oz.

The opening snap was pure projection ...

Roll that line around on your tongue:

I am not convinced that my own views on these and other travesties are so compelling that they might command precious space in the realm of public discourse.

So why are you ranting?

Why don't you just STFU, crawl under a rock, go away?

The pond saved the rant to the intermittent archive, what with it being such a strange and puzzling insistence that we should all shut up, mind that we should stick to our lanes and not say boo to a goose and all would be well ...

It was peak rhetorical indignation and absurdity ... and so the pond presents the remainder of the text unencumbered by visual distraction or commentary ...

...Should all people of Chinese ethnicity, who might have been born in Australia or somewhere else outside China, and who are not members of the Chinese Communist Party, be expected as a condition of their gaining access to a public platform for whatever unrelated reason to use that platform to make very clear that they do not support the relentless subjugation of the Muslim Uighur population by the Chinese party-state, or that they are critical of the deaths in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution?
Not only that; should they on any occasion when they approach the public realm, online or offline, repudiate all wrongdoings on the part of the CCP, and keep doing so?
What of our fast-growing ethnically Indian population? Should we demand that they publicly disavow Prime Minister Narendra Modi over accusations of escalating religious tensions? Are Australians of Russian descent going to be held to account for the many horrors of Vladimir Putin?
Our citizens of Myanmar origin may almost all have escaped persecution – but perhaps they too should be held to account for the tyrannical military junta that they fled. One does not need to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome to be troubled by Donald Trump – so surely Americans living in our midst must confess his sins as their own?
The promotion of guilt by association has become widespread in Australia. For instance, if you are deemed to look Jewish, you’re held responsible by some Australians for the claimed genocide in Gaza. The only source of possible if still partial exculpation is public dissociation.
One fears that next in line for such guilty sentences might be Chinese, Indian, Russian, Myanmar, American, and any other people with connections – however innocent on their own part – to people or groups who have behaved badly.
Despite our efforts to achieve, we are increasingly defined in some social arenas not by accomplishment, experience or character, but by race, birthplace, and other “identity” categories. Unless we opt very publicly out of our identity markers, shedding connections and relationships, we are assumed to be collusive with enemy outlooks, dispositions, or simply with the enemy itself.
This applies not only to individuals but also to organisations – and thus, in addition, to those who might be associated with such organisations in any way. If an institution fails to attack publicly those deemed to be enemies of a particular peer group, then that group will demand that the institution and related individuals must be shunned.
For failure to attack publicly leaders, countries or causes with which an individual and their peer group disagrees – or the opposite – is perceived as tantamount to complicity. To fail to express, in public, concern about the impacts of climate change risks denunciation as a “climate sceptic”, even if that person does indeed share such anxiety while not sharing assuredness that a public proclamation would ameliorate the situation.
This expectation is not universal. Who is entitled – even required – to demand public space to promote their personal views on areas beyond their expertise or particular knowledge? Artists, writers, musicians, actors, academics – culture-work professionals, essentially.
We do not see a commensurate insistence from pharmacists, mining engineers or accountants, for instance, that before filling a script or shipping copper or signing an audit, they are provided online space or offline time to deliver their views on current political debates.
Last year, Doechii, a hip-hop performer, said on stage in receiving an award: “It is my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people, for black people, for Latino people, for trans people, for the people in Gaza.”
I might use this space to critique hip-hop, and to speak up for purveyors of traditional folk and blues music, or for Baroque recorder ensembles. But that would be beyond my responsibility.
Rowan Callick is an expert associate at the Australian National University’s National Security College.

Make of that what you will.

What did the pond make of it?

As before. If only Rowan would take his own advice, and STFU ...disappear up his fundament, head off to a black hole of his choice, and take climate change with him.

And now this ...

As always the answer lies in the detail, because kick anything out of doors to send the rats scuttling ...

And now this ... oh America ...